Business education at AUB started in 1900 and was provided either by a Department or a semi-autonomous School under the University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences for approximately one hundred years. In celebration of the hundred-year anniversary of offering business programs, AUB established in September 2000 an independent School of Business (later named the Suliman S. Olayan School of Business, “OSB”) as the sixth Faculty of the University.

To date, AUB has graduated over 8,000 students from its undergraduate business programs and over 1,800 from its graduate business programs. Since its formal establishment as a distinct school, OSB has grown its full-time faculty complement from 13 in the academic year 2000–2001 to over 52 today. It now graduates approximately 350 students from its undergraduate program and 80 students from its graduate programs every year.

OSB currently offers five degree programs: an Executive Master of Business Administration (herein referred to as the “Executive MBA”), a Master of Business Administration (herein referred to as the “MBA”), a Master in Human Resources Management (herein reffered to as the "MHRM"), a Master in Finance (herein referred to as the MFin) and a Bachelor of Business Administration (herein referred to as the “BBA”).

The First AUB Faculty to Be Named

In June 2003, the AUB School of Business was named the Suliman S. Olayan School of Business (herein referred to as “OSB”) in honor of the late international Saudi businessman and AUB trustee whose family has always been a major supporter of AUB.

This watershed event triggered a series of major developments intended to broaden and deepen the delivery of quality undergraduate and graduate business programs at AUB. An entirely new curriculum was introduced for the BBA and MBA degrees in the Fall of 2001. Both degrees were redesigned to follow leading trends in international business education. In the Spring of 2004, OSB launched the Executive MBA program in response to the professional development needs of senior corporate leaders in the region.